


the outskirts of grace

by gracieminabox



Series: horizons universe [17]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Divorce, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Motherhood, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 09:48:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18689056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracieminabox/pseuds/gracieminabox
Summary: "And spare my precious boy from my torment, from this exile to the outskirts of grace, and etch into his marrow that I loved him with my entire wounded heart and unquiet mind and aching soul, until my last breath.”An abbreviated history of the mother of Christopher Pike.





	the outskirts of grace

**Author's Note:**

> I strongly suggest reading "the way our horizons meet" prior to reading this story so that you have some baseline familiarity with the protagonist; however, it is certainly not a requirement and can be read independently.

She spends her first day in the hospital curled into a ball on her bed, staring at the bare ecru wall in front of her. She doesn’t feel. She thinks maybe she wants to cry, but she can’t. Some wild animal is quivering in her chest but won’t just burst forth and be done with. It doesn’t hurt, not really - it’s uncomfortable, nagging, but not a knife-deep pain.

“How are you feeling?”

It’s Dr. Hayes, coming to check on his problem patient.

That’s not fair. He’s a good guy. But he’s also a shrink. All shrinks have a common personality type, she thinks. Tepid water. Unbuttered toast. Pick your own boring metaphor.

“Emily?”

She turns her head slightly, so she can see him in her peripheral vision. It’s then she notices that her cheek still tingles a little from when Josh kissed her goodbye this morning. It’s not painful - not physically, not emotionally, not nostalgically. She just notices it.

“I’m  _ not _ feeling.”

Dr. Hayes sighs in that way they must teach in med school - the sigh-but-not-a-sigh - and approaches her. “Can you sit up, please?”

She obeys the request, because even annoyance is a feeling, and as previously noted, she’s not feeling.

Dr. Hayes is holding a slim black armband with a large, liquid blue patch on it - like someone poured the ink out of a neon blue highlighter and stashed a pocket of it in the elastic. “Meds,” he says, gesturing to her arm. “There’s a sensor in the armband that gives you time-released doses based on your neurotransmitter balance. Better compliance while you’re inpatient.”

She doesn’t particularly care. She lets him put the armband on her. The adhesive is sticky on her skin. Her cheek tingles again.

“When was the last time you ate?”

She gives a half-hearted shrug. She brings her hand up to touch her necklace, the one Josh gave to her the night of their junior prom, a calla lily on a silver chain. It’s warm. Probably from her own body heat, but maybe not.

Maybe it’s warm from when she leaned down early this morning and kissed her son’s sleeping face. Warm from when it brushed against her baby’s cheek as she begged her traitorous brain to remember this.  _ Forget who I am all you like, but do not forget my baby’s smell, the feel of his little curls brushing my nose as I kissed him goodbye. _

Maybe it’s warm from Chris. Warm from her little boy.

“Emily?”

She doesn’t notice she’s crying until she hears a tear land on the bedspread with a  _ thwack. _

~

Dr. Hayes drags her to group therapy three days into her stay. It’s bullshit. Okay, fine, she  _ can  _ see the hypothetical appeal of sharing coping strategies with people who are going through the same shit you are; but that’s not what this is. The diagnoses in her group range from schizophrenia to dissociative identity to PTSD - cousins of variable removal from her own diagnosis. All genders, all ages, all histories. Voluntary and involuntary admits. Literally the only thing they all have in common is being in this place because their brains work differently from everyone else’s. And that’s not much, because their brains work differently from each others’, too.

“I’m sure you’ve all noticed we have a new face in the group,” Rosemary says at the start of the session. “Welcome, Emily.”

There are mumbles and mutters of “hi” and its variants around her, and she shrinks in on herself a little. “Hi.”

For the first fifty minutes, she stays quiet, listening to her fellow residents. For all Rosemary encourages them to focus on  _ now  _ and on  _ the future,  _ there’s a lot of natural digression into talking about their lives Before -  _ I was a waiter. I ran a childcare center. I was in a post-doc program. I used to be a stay-at-home mom.  _ There’s a lot of past tense being thrown around in the group, and every  _ did  _ or  _ was  _ or verb ending in  _ -ed  _ seems to wrap its fingers into her heart and squeeze with a dull, achy grip. She’s not sure what to make of that.

She touches her calla again, not knowing why.

Her thoughts drift. She considers her own Before. How would she summarize it, if it was her turn to talk? Her childhood was just a continuing stream of not-good-enough-itis and her adulthood was dominated by therapy and medications and shrinks, not interests or passions or careers.  _ I was a daughter, but in name only. I was a wife, but out of necessity. I was a one-time bartender, but I got shit-canned for being unable to get out of bed one day. I was a mother -  _

No. No. No past tense. Not on that one.

_ I am a mother. _

She plays with the sentence in her mouth without parting her lips, wrapping her tongue around it.  _ I am a mother. I am a mother.  _ It has a certain comforting cadence to it, a mantra, an identity, and a reminder all in one.  _ I am a mother. _

She doesn’t notice that the group broke a few minutes ago, that she now sits with an empty semicircle of chairs around her.

“I am a mother,” she whispers aloud.

The quiver that’s been in her chest since she got there is momentarily quieted.

~

“What’s this?”

Dr. Hayes smiles. “You told me once you liked to write, right?”

She nods. Since she first learned how to print her name, it’s been her way to cope with her mom and her boyfriends and their bullshit, and later with becoming a wife and mother barely out of high school. Granted, all of that was Before. She hadn’t journaled in years.

Dr. Hayes nods to the battered purple notebook in her hands. “I think it might help.”

That night, she writes  _ I’m a mother  _ on the first page. Nothing more.

~

Josh looks nervous. He didn’t even look this nervous before they had sex for the first time. He’s shuffling from one foot to the next and he keeps clenching and unclenching his hands. “Hey, Em.”

She smiles a little smile. She lets him kiss her cheek. It feels hollow. “Hey.”

They sit. He nods at her shoulders. “Nice haircut.”

She looks down to the side. The haircut was an impulse decision - one of many she’s grown to regret as soon as her meds quietly remind her to calm the fuck down. Also, Josh is lying; he loved her long hair. “Thanks.”

There’s an awkward silence. “How’s Chris?” she finally asks.

Josh lets out a breath. “He’s good,” he says. “He’s...he’s really smart. He and Dad have gotten really close.”

She smiles. Vince was always so kind to her. She’s glad he’s part of her son’s life. “Good.”

Josh swallows audibly. She knows what’s coming. “Em, listen, I’ve been - ”

“You want a divorce.”

Josh stops, tongue still poised to finish the thought, and blinks at her. “Emily - ”

“It’s fine,” she says truthfully, but Josh steamrolls her.

“I love you so much - ”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s just, you’ve been in here so long - ”

“It’s fine.”

“If I thought there was - ”

“Joshua.”

Josh stops, finally, mouth still agape.

“It’s fine.”

She’s surprised to check in with her emotions and realize that that isn’t a lie, that it actually  _ is  _ fine. Nobody particularly wants to add “divorced” to their list of personalized adjectives, but she’s not crushed or heartbroken or angry or even upset. She’s...fine. It’s almost liberating.

“Is there somebody else?” she asks, out of sheer curiosity - almost hoping there is.

“No,” Josh breathes, a little aghast. “No, of course not. I’d never do that to you.”

She nods, quirking her lips up into a smile. “There will be.”

Josh’s shoulders seem to deflate, and he looks at her with the kind of fond concern he showed when she first started showing symptoms, the one she never quite knew what to do with. “I’m so sorry.”

She shakes her head. “I told you, it’s fine.”

There’s another awkward pause before he says, “I’ll have the papers drawn up. All you’ll need to do is sign them.”

She nods. They stand and embrace, and it already feels drained of whatever they used to have.

“Can you do something for me?”

Josh separates from her, keeping his hands on her shoulders. “Yeah, anything.”

She purses her lips. “When you send me the papers, can you also send me a current picture of Chris?” Fine tremors seem to make their way through her hands. “I haven’t seen him in so long.”

Josh nods. “I promise.”

And he’s gone.

Marriage really does belong in her  _ was  _ category now.

~

Ten days later, the divorce papers arrive. Josh kept his promise; there’s a wallet-sized picture in the envelope, right atop the section on custodial arrangements.

The breath goes out of her when she sees him.

He’s got ruddy cheeks and the shyest little smile, lips barely parted. He’s still got Josh’s blue-grey eyes and her barely-upturned nose and the thickest, fluffiest hair, a halo of spun gold.

He looks smart. He looks kind. He looks sweet.

“Chris,” she whispers.

She doesn’t even blink when she signs the papers, but she stays up all night, unable to take her eyes off her little boy.

~

“Do you ever think about what you might do after your discharge?”

She looks up at Dr. Hayes like he’s sprouted two extra heads. “What I’d do after my  _ what now?” _

“Your discharge,” Dr. Hayes repeats patiently. “From the hospital.” He shrugs; it’s uncharacteristically casual for him. “You’ve been in here for nearly ten years, Emily. We’ve hit a good balance of meds; as long as you stay faithful to the regimen, you’re hardly a danger to yourself or others. You’d easily qualify for a transition to community-based care. You don’t need to be inpatient anymore.”

She gets the feeling that should be taken as a good thing. She doesn’t see it that way.

“I see the gears turning. What are you thinking?”

She shakes her head. “You’re the shrink,” she says dismissively. “You know my family constellation. Tell me: what would  _ community-based care _ look like for me?” Unsurprisingly, Dr. Hayes doesn’t take the bait, so she continues. “Where would I go? Back to my mother’s house - the same one who kicked me out when I got pregnant, who wouldn’t take me to the hospital for Tanzian flu because her boyfriend thought I was too dependent on her? My ex-husband’s house, so I can upend the life of a teenage son who probably doesn’t even remember me except for my negligence? Maybe with one of my pseudo-stepfathers? Which one, do you think? The dead one’s obviously out, so we’re left with either the one who stole my birthday money to buy street duraphine or the one who beat the shit out of me if I didn’t vacuum the floors to his satisfaction. Of course, I could get a place of my own. That’d be easy, what with my lack of credit, higher education, special skills, or job history.”

“I get the point, Emily,” Dr. Hayes breaks in gently.

She shakes her head again. She is suddenly very, very tired. “Community-based care implies the need for a community,” she says softly. “This place is the only community I have now.”

~

There’s a massive winter thunderstorm the night of Chris’ seventeenth birthday - the kind of storm she’s hardly ever seen, having lived her entire life in the desert. She wakes to the decrescendo of the electrical grid as it shorts out. Power outages from electrical storms are extremely unusual in the twenty-third century; they’ve been known to happen, but centuries of innovation have created backups on backups on backups that make them very rare.

“Fuck was that?” her roommate Andrea mumbles sleepily.

“Power,” she answers. “It’ll be back in a second.”

The next day, she doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror. The day after that, her head’s caustically telling her that she’s never been loved - not by her mother, not by her erstwhile father figures, not by Josh, not even by Chris, even if the last one was never his fault. The day after that, she sees herself from outside of her body, looking out the window of her room, wondering if the water in the brook running by is enough to drown herself in. It should be a terrifying thought. It’s a pacifying one.

Dispassionately, she recognizes that she’s in about as bad a place as one can be.

“I’m a mother,” she whispers, even as her hands go to try to open the retinal-lock window. Logically, she knows it’s futile, but logic is not in control right now.

“I’m a mother,” she whispers, her hands beating against the triple-pane window of shatterproof glass.

_ “I’m a mother,”  _ she whispers, trying to hear her own voice above the cacophony of  _ not mom not daddy not rick not johnny not josh not chris not chris not chris not even my baby couldn’t do that right not even chris. _

She doesn’t notice that the vibrant blue in her armband has gone a murky, dank grey color.

“Emily,” a voice cuts in behind her, “step away from the window. Now.”

The drywall of the room cracks around her fists as she fruitlessly, hopelessly beats at the wall, trying in vain to dislodge the glass from the window.  _ You can’t even kill yourself right -  _ the voice that sounds sneeringly like Rick’s.  _ Worthless little nothing.  _

_I can too Rick I can do it all by myself see I’m not clingy and weak and sensitive I’m strong enough for this_ bubbles up in her throat. She grits her teeth against it, continuing to punch at the wall until a hole emerges, splinters wedging into her skin. “I’m a mother.”

Large hands wrap around her wrists and pull her from the wall. She yells - she doesn’t know what. Dr. Hayes’ thin frame comes into her periphery, and he jabs a hypo into her jugular.

“I’m a mother,” she breathes, before she drifts away.

~

She wakes in the medical unit. Her armband patch is bright blue again. Her knuckles are sore as shit and she’s a little dazed, but Dr. Hayes is there.

“Hey, Emily,” he says gently. “Do you remember what happened?”

She blinks. It’s patchy. “Not really, no.”

Dr. Hayes nods. “When the grid and the generators shorted out during the storm this week, it interrupted our ability to control the time-release of your meds. Our IT team thought they’d fixed it for all the residents, but apparently not. You got shorted pretty badly.”

She swallows. “Did I hurt anybody?”

He nods to her hands. “Only yourself.”

She feels shame bloom on her cheeks. She doesn’t hear Rick’s or Johnny’s voices anymore, but the echoes of  _ you did bad you are bad  _ remain. “I’m sorry.”

Dr. Hayes shakes his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Emily.”

She can’t quite make herself believe that.

~

_ Starfleet personnel are overly prone to essentializing historical events down to their strategic value for officers going forward, but it is vital that we remember the psychological, emotional, and even spiritual elements here, too. George Kirk’s decisions were not made in a vacuum. Yes, they were informed by the threat posed to his crewmates in escape pods and the absence of any viable alternatives to maximize lives saved. But they were also informed by a love of his wife and newborn son, and an understanding that the most loving thing he could do for his child would also necessarily cause his absence from his life. _

She’s read every word of his dissertation, over and over again, even the technical parts she can’t begin to understand - but it’s this page that she keeps coming back to, the page where Chris talks about George Kirk’s sacrifice in terms of his family.

_ The most loving thing he could do for his child would also necessarily cause an absence from his life. _

She remembered the day Dr. Hayes first brought up the idea of inpatient treatment, the day she asked what kind of mother abandoned her baby like that.

“A mother who knows it’s the best thing for her child,” Dr. Hayes had said gently. “A mother who’s out of better options.”

She didn’t understand it then. She understands it now.

And maybe - just maybe - Chris sees the parallel, and Chris understands it too.

~

“He is  _ cute!” _

She tears her eyes from the screen and looks over her shoulder. Jordan - loud, bold, borderline, but very sweet - has pulled up a chair and is sitting backwards in it, looking at the terminal delightedly. 

“Thank you.”

Jordan gives her a little head cock and a questioning look.

“He’s my son,” she elaborates, turning back to the screen, an image of her boy in his Starfleet dress uniform, looking so, so handsome. “He got married this weekend.”

“Congratulations,” Jordan says sincerely, nodding to the screen again. “Is that his husband?”

“No, his best man,” she says. “Phil.  _ That’s  _ his wife,” she adds, scrolling to a different picture that shows her daughter-in-law.  _ I have a daughter-in-law!  _ she thinks incredulously.

Jordan arches an eyebrow with a noncommittal “oh.” They’re both thinking the same thing, she knows, though neither of them will verbalize it.  _ He looks twice as happy in the picture with Phil as with his new wife. _

“Oh,” Jordan finally says, gracefully ignoring the obvious, “he’s in Starfleet, too? That’s cool.”

“Yeah,” she says, “a lieutenant commander. He serves on a science ship called the Sagan.”

Jordan sees the sadness in the smile that crosses her face and pats her shoulder gently. “It’s hard. Being away from your kid.”

She closes her eyes and nods, the familiar dull ache in her chest squeezing rhythmically. “When it’s bad,” she says, not needing to elaborate, “it’s how I reorient myself. Remembering I’m a mother.”

“Are you, though?”

She whips her head around. Another resident, Angel - which she’s not - is speaking, one hand on her hip, an unbecoming sneer on her face. 

“Good  _ god, _ Angel,” Jordan intones. “That was ugly.”

Angel shrugs nonchalantly. “Just being honest,” she says. “You’ve been in here most of his life. You haven’t seen him since he was, what, five? He was barely even potty trained when you were last in his life, and now he’s a married man.” She lets out a breath of deeply unkind laughter. “How much  _ mothering  _ have you really done?”

It’s funny - for all her problems with impulse control, for all the many and varied medications she needs to keep her emotions in check, this is the first time she’s ever known this degree of rage. She feels her cheeks flush and her vision goes white with the heat of her anger. With blatantly false calm, she rises from her chair and walks the few paces that separate her from Angel. There is no yelling, no cussing. Instead, she raises her hand and slaps Angel,  _ hard,  _ right across her face.

_ “Emily!” _ Jordan breathes behind her. In her periphery, she can see the charge nurse picking up her comm to call for backup. Angel is cradling her tender face, the thin glaze of smugness somehow still overlaying her shock.

“If you  _ ever _ mention my son again,” she says, low and venomous, “I will make you very glad you’re already in a hospital. Do we understand each other?”

Two nursing assistants arrive at her elbows to break up the fight, such as it is, and Angel is transferred to a different floor the following day.

The incident never makes it into her file. He’ll never confirm it, but she knows Dr. Hayes intervened to make it so.

~

She finds a picture of Chris in the Starfleet database. It’s a candid of him aboard a ship, looking out a window, a cup of coffee in his hands. There are little sprinkles of silver intermixed with the gold in his hair now - he’s going grey early, just like she did. He no longer has his wedding ring on. She wonders what happened.

Chris’ face looks too serious. His eyes look too tired. She knows that expression. She’s worn that expression.

Her heart gives a seizing cry of pain at the thought that her baby might be waging his own battle against his mind - and one of rage at the further thought that, if he is, it’s her fault.

She’s never prayed. She’s never believed. But in that moment, she finds herself begging whoever or whatever pulls the strings here on Earth to spare him this, to grant him the serenity and contentment she’s never known but he definitely deserves.

_ If you don’t,  _ she silently pleads with the universe,  _ I will never find peace. And if I don’t, then what the hell have I been in here for all this time? _

~

She’s surrounded by eggheads. Dr. Hayes, two of the regular med wing docs from the hospital, and some specialist from LA are all sitting, shuffling a PADD amongst the four of them.

Well. Three of the eggheads are. Dr. Hayes is just calmly sitting, hands folded, the picture of neutrality.

Finally, the LA specialist looks up. She lets out a long, steady sigh. “Emily - ”

“How long?”

The specialist pauses, mouth agape, reminding her bizarrely of Josh when he asked for a divorce. “I’m sorry?”

She shakes her head, smiling slightly. “I’ve got a mass in my abdomen the size of a cantaloupe and I’m bleeding after menopause. I’m not stupid. I’m dying. I just want to know when.”

The LA specialist looks to her colleagues, obviously a little flustered. It’s Dr. Hayes who answers the question.

“A few months.”

She nods. She skips right through all the stages of grief and goes right to acceptance, because she has no other choice. She’s not thrilled about the fact that she’s dying, obviously, but she’s definitely not sad about it, either.

“Okay.” She nods to the door. “Can I go?”

The LA specialist stammers. “But - but we haven’t even - you - ”

Dr. Hayes nods. “Sure, you can go.”

She does.

~

She sits in the blazing late summer sunshine, at the top of the steps that lead down to the brook in front of the hospital. Her journal is open in her lap.

_ “And spare my precious boy from my torment,”  _ she writes,  _ “from this exile to the outskirts of grace, and etch into his marrow that I loved him with my entire wounded heart and unquiet mind and aching soul, until my last breath.” _

“You wearing sun protection?” Dr. Hayes asks from behind her, his bones creaking audibly as he sits next to her. “September sun in Bakersfield is a killer.”

She smiles wryly, closing her journal. “I’m already dying,  _ Gene.” _

He sobers, but he nods to concede the point. “Touche.”

She watches an egret fly by and land in the brook, looking for morsels in the water. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Why haven’t you retired yet?” She turns to him when he doesn’t answer right away. “I mean, you’re, what, eighty?”

“Eighty-three, but thank you.”

“Right. So why are you still here?”

Dr. Hayes smiles sadly. “You.”

She’s a little startled. “Me?”

He nods. There’s a long pregnant pause before he speaks again, slowly. “You have the same diagnosis my mother did,” he tells her. “She didn’t get enough help.”

Her heart sinks. She can extrapolate the rest. “I’m sorry.”

He nods. “I couldn’t let that happen to another mother,” he says softly. “No matter how long it took.”

She purses her lips, feeling close to tears despite the mood stabilizers that usually suppress them, and feels a rush of immense gratitude for this man she’s known for longer than anyone else in her entire life. “Thank you.”

~

She’s weak. She’s not in any pain - duraphine is a hell of a drug - but she’s definitely weak, definitely not all there. She manages to reach up and touch her calla lily pendant again, a surprisingly strong memory hitting her.

_ “God, it’s beautiful.” _

_ “You like it?” _

_ “I love it.” _

_ “I read somewhere that calla lilies are supposed to symbolize beauty and passion...and, you know, sexuality.” _

_ “Subtle, Joshua. Real subtle.” _

She looked it up once, years later, when she was pregnant with Chris. Calla lilies do symbolize beauty and passion and sexuality - but they also symbolize triumph. Triumph and strength.

The older she’s gotten, the less she’s cared about the meaning Josh found in it and the more she’s cared about triumph and strength. About finding it wherever she can.

She’s dizzy.

She looks out the window. It’s a clear, moonless night in the desert, and even though her vision’s starting to go soft around the edges, she can see the stars, speckles of ice on a navy velvet blanket. She wonders which of those stars Chris is nearest right now. She wonders if she’ll be able to reach out and touch it. Touch him.

Things go fuzzy. Is she floating? Is she  _ flying? _

A nurse shouts something as he comes into the room. She doesn’t register it.

“I’m a mother,” she whispers.

She smiles, lets go, and is weightless.

Emily Beckett has triumphed.


End file.
